I admire your enthusiastic determination, however I'd be somewhat wary about popularity being used to determine the winner. Because a writer could get more votes by getting his/her mates to cast more votes. Just because people are fans of Transformers doesn't necessarily make them good judges of actual writing. Some people can be attracted to stories that are badly written -- e.g. the Twilight series. Not all popular stories are well written... the Bay movies are more popular and widely known TF stories than Beast Wars, but we all know which series has the better stories.

Also, for the competition to be fair, I think there needs to be some set conditions for all contestants to abide by. Perhaps a pre-determined elements. Once these factors are pre-set, it's up to contestants to fill in the rest. There would also be a word limit too. For example, everyone may need to write a short story about any G1 Transformer(s) who did not appear in The Transformers: The Movie but was previously seen in the G1 cartoon. The story must take place at the same time as any of the events during TFTM (so it cannot occur before or after) and it cannot conflict with canonical events in TFTM. So entrants may choose to write about say Omega Supreme or the Combaticons or Sparkplug Witwicky etc. And say there's a 300 word limit or something.

The only downside of course, is that this would much more time intensive for IDW as someone would need to read through and evaluate all these entries. But it would remove the "popularity contest" aspect and try to make it based on merit/ability. Takara ran competitions during Beast Wars allowing fans to submit designs, with winning designs being made into actual toys (thus Archadys, Mach Kick and Bazooka were created; Star Upper was also based on a winning fan design, though wasn't made into a toy (but the character did make canonical appearances (as well as Paulbot's avatar ))).